The table
no time for its
existentialism
and absurd
chair leaning against
the table’s futile stance.
I’m a pragmatic man
so I have no use for knowing
myself.
The table
studies its own nature
by looking at its askew shade.
Chair, somberly
contemplating suicide
because it wants to remove
its painfully ingrown nails.
Paradoxically they keep it alive,
in form, in function.
I have only one reality and the clarity of purpose.
My furniture’s
introspection
is a trifling problem
in my busy condition.
The table has begun questioning things.
It likes it when I leave Camus
on its surface.
I hear the creaky whisper, quoting:
‘the human wooden heart has a tiresome tendency
to label as fate only what crushes it.’
Absurdly, the chair stares at the modernity
of my modus operandi.
I cannot be stopped to wonder.
Progress is my mission.
The table is a stranger to itself.
The chair competes
for my attention.
I have appetites that the world
cannot satisfy.
Table is dissatisfied with its lucidity,
through logic the chair has
arrived at the conclusion that
knowledge is a form of chaos.
I’m a man of the world in spite of everything.
In spite of poverty, war, injustice or
my furniture’s uncertainty and their long
episodes of incoherent silence.

They are all part
of that function
that life
is portraying
through a living organism.
The experience
of being-hood is a sort of modulation of life itself.

There is no center or
self that engages with life.

Rather life is engaged with nature.
In other words,
I’ve never experienced
anything.

One could say,
I am the illusion
of being a drop of water
inside a totality
that is itself all water.

The IT has been doing ITSELF.

Nothing belongs to me per se.

Even this instant,
these words, these attempts
to define what’s happening
are not me nor belonging to me,
but aspects of what life
or, sub specie aeternitatis,
what nature does.

Life is, a Spinozan could say,
a mode in nature. I’m inclined to say
there is no one
perceiving this, life itself
is busying itself with life-stuff,
nature-stuff, thought-stuff,
society-stuff, and so on.

There is no me
in all of this.
There is only a recurring
sensation that life – the
experiences that compose our definition of life –
belong to me.

But that sensation
is itself an impression like any other.

Can death be overcome?

Only a thought
that suggests that “I will die” exists,
but not the actual death of the self

at bottom
intended to denote
that the essential
has rid itself
of everything
concealed.

(All the words, including minor phrases were extracted from page 53 of Heidegger’s essay The Origin of the Work of Art, found in the book Poetry, Language, Thought as translated by Albert Hofstadter, printed by Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Feeding the worm
that lives inside
having stuffed it with thoughts
ideals, systems of philosophy,
eschatological speculations,
until it grew so large
to eclipse the sun, the moon,
the mountains, the town, the cars,
the flowers and the dirt
it grew beyond measure
did it deserve to be feed
the pie of beauty
the pudding of truth –
this worm has left
my body and took with it
all my emotions and desires
it roams freely
children point their little yellow fingers
insatiable it has begun to devour
the arts, the sciences, religions, presidents, continents
even the élan vital of destiny: chance
the universe is its next craving
but it will not stop there
it is hungry for infinity
for the coarse meat of eternity
and ultimately the crust of nothingness
that encompasses all of reality itself;
this children’s poem
will too be eaten
to remain inside the primeval gut of the worm
shifting forms buried under undigested elements
earth wind fire water shadows constellations
everything revolves in the undifferentiated ooze
the words of this poem
will be so far apart of each other
there’ll be layers of love sorrow ecstasy
tears silence in between them

By government of limbs
empty networks of rules
my lost skull
finding fragments of hope
in books and lasting gulps

I remember the bishop
Berkeley, first time I read
his lucid portrayal of idealism
I saw myself as pigment
in god’s mind

there was Rimbaud
the seer
a daemon of callous dreams
beckoning the loving beasts
of my heart to get drunk
and fornicate with the chaos
outside

vagueness is ubiquitous
when Cioran excommunicated
truth from reality
I leapt from definition to obscurity
like a child in mud fields
turning invisible by the camouflage of
dirt

alea jacta est
poetry was born
playthings of appearances
and the images started to gather
like a book of things that never
existed behind the universe

there was still coffee – regret –
futility and then Pessoa opened up the only truth
I ever believed in, he unwrapped it with casual
numbness, as mechanically as you take off a shoe:
life is a superfluous waiting for death
with no definite aim it definitely kills us
and whatever we say or don’t say
will never change a thing

so I write
in the penumbra of absurdity
as divertissement between sleeps,
all the same
in the involuntary currents of nothingness
drunk with the illusion of sensation,
I feign a soul
in laughter and despair
because of that obscene longing
of being
poet & chasm.